USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The West Church, Boston; commemorative services on the fiftieth anniversary of its present ministry, and the one hundred and fiftieth of its foundation, on Tuesday, March 1, 1887, with three sermons by its pastor > Part 6
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ever searching for, yet unable to attain." Being asked if he had not been tired by an ordaining ser- mon an hour and a half long, to parry blame and protect his tenderness with artless cunning at one stroke, he answered, " I was tired before our brother began!" His slight morsel of mortality, shivering in his quilted wrapper at the wind, was however cast in heroic mould. When the mayor of Boston refused the use of Faneuil Hall to celebrate the martyrdom of the Antislavery Lovejoy who fell de- fending his printing-press, his courageous appeal to the citizens obliged the municipal council to reverse the decree. As the human tide rolled into the old cradle on that occasion and it began to rock as of yore, a friend at his side asked, " Can you stand thun- der? " " Yes," he responded, " of this sort to any ex- tent." In perhaps the only instance of sarcasm he was ever known to be guilty of, he dealt briefly with the attorney-general who had said Lovejoy had died as the fool dieth. Having once accepted an invita- tion to a great dinner-party, he told me it was a great sacrifice to the animal nature ; but it pleased him to see how small a portion of it was consumed. He would not preach a dedication-sermon because not in sympathy with a showy church.
This in my chambers of imagery is the rational- ist. " Is it reasonable ?" was the question he asked respecting every doctrine, proceeding, policy, or form. He wrote and preached much on the evi- dences of Christianity, and was one of them him-
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self. The Christ whose lover and votary he was, looking forward to see him in heaven, - that Christ had a large hand in making him, and with no need to be ashamed of this particular specimen of work. The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant, after a vain attempt to demonstrate to the under- standing the existence of God and persistence of the human soul, fell back on what he considered the moral argument, -on the conscience in man, which is called the voice of God. But that witness is not only from, but for God! If the poet's word be true respecting the painter or sculptor, -
"Himself from God he could not free," -
the good word or deed of every worthy man is a divine attestation, and implies a celestial origin and destiny, - as the river tells of its source in clouds invisible, and of its emptying into the distant sea. But on no testimony of others can we live, unless in pure devotion we add to it our own.
Channing is the liberal leader. He bore, as he said, cheerfully the name " Unitarian " only as a re- proach. Nature speaks not of number in God. He is one in all, not three in all; He is innumerable. Channing's own name is without spot. No sin lies at his door; no apology is needed for his life or for any page from his pen. As the sky is not stained by the clouds that pass over it, there was no blot on his soul from the evil in the world. Through him never a sign of offence or note of
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scandal came. His best eulogy at his decease was in our vestry and from the lips of his great contem- porary, Taylor the Bethel preacher, who described him, when about to die, as turning on his bed to the sun that streamed at afternoon from the west through the window half-shaded with the clamber- ing vines. From this picture of the last scene, the great Methodist passed to exhortation, and cried to us who listened, " Walk in the light! Walk in the light !"
Do you say of my descriptions and anticipations, " We want not fancies, but facts ? " I answer, What is a fact? Something, is it not, that exists in the world by a law? Such is a mountain, or a mine of rock or metal or coal or oil. It has come to exist by an evolution of Nature through the will of God. It is a fact! Is not a feeling in human nature, any persuasion that is higher than a mountain, deeper than a mine, and wider than a layer of the globe, also a fact ? Does it not come to exist by a law, and crop out of history like the granite of the hills, and gush up like the fountains beneath the heart, whose springs are fed from every cloud of trouble and by the dews of grace? I claim as facts the senti- ments of men and women, whose lives and char- acters adorn the landscape and ennoble mankind. I think Heaven cares less for zodiac or ecliptic than for our thought and hope. Let us thank God for this our human frame; that, as much as the River Amazon is made to run, and as Chimborazo to rise,
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and as the vale of Chamouni to sink, so we are fash- ioned to love, aspire, and revere; and that the features of Nature will and do change, the hills crumble, depths fill, and streams dry more and sooner than the soul can cease to live, to love, and to pray.
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II.
THAT WHICH WE HAVE SEEN AND HEARD DECLARE WE UNTO YOU, THAT YE ALSO MAY HAVE FELLOWSHIP WITH US. - I John i. 3.
A S in churches of so-called "close communion " fellowship means separation and discord rather, the few men and women, one of a thou- sand, who by some life-boat or fire-escape get safe away from the world as from a burning house or sinking ship; and as ecclesiastical history shows that such fellowship, not of heart and feeling, but of creed and form, falls under pressure like a sandy foundation or a baseless bridge, the quarrels among communicants being notorious, while in a well-constructed arch opposite stones stand firm in their places and contribute alike to the beauty and endurance of the whole, because they obey and rest on an invisible principle of gravitation, - so a com- mon character and spirit reconcile the widest diver- sities of custom and belief.
To demonstrate this proposition, and as a sequel to our first of March observance, I refer to three , men, - Emerson, Bushnell, and Taylor, -as signal
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illustrations : Emerson the idealist, Bushnell the congregationalist, and Taylor the enthusiast. In the realm of the understanding how divergent the tracks of these real fellows in the world's university! But do not scouts of a military host and geograph- ical explorers have the same object and secure the same end, in however many directions of parallel or meridian they part? Paul and Barnabas were not fellow-travellers. Every prophet, apostle, evangelist went his own way. In regard to the three Ameri- cans I have named, note some particulars of funda- mental accord. How do they meet ? I answer -
I. By inspiration of religious genius, -in Emer- son, through ideas in the reason; in Bushnell, through evangelical doctrines; in Taylor, through sentiments of the heart. Emerson was an eye: he must see for himself. He took nothing on authority ; he ques- tioned every statement ; his countenance was a benevolent interrogation-point. Never was a face which was at once such an open door and such an insurmountable bar. The judgment-seat shone through his eyes. No assumption or tradition un- verified could pass. He said, " I am an inquirer, with no past at my back!" He thought principle was all, and the person of Jesus was brought forward too much. "Never let me hear that man's name again," he was ready to cry with Voltaire. Christian- ity at one time he considered as having done more harm than good. He broke with his society because he could not administer the Lord's Supper in the
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accepted style. He ridiculed a clergyman who, as the sexton had forgotten to supply the font with water, nevertheless scooped the bowl with his hand and christened the baby with air; and he quoted with zest the critic who said the priest baptizes his own fingers. Yet the Church drew him back and sucked him in. This man born of a seven-fold clerical ancestry, ecclesiastical bishop who could not bear a clerical robe, this minister with no charge, this monk without a frock, stood alone as no prelate did for the entrance of the Holy Spirit into the pri- vate soul, and through that into the church and the world; and Father Taylor said that of all men he had ever known, Emerson was the most Christ-like. He knew, said Taylor, no more about Christianity than did Balaam's ass of the Hebrew tongue; but Taylor, laying his own ear close to Emerson's heart, though there was a screw loose somewhere, he said, he yet could detect no jar in the machinery ; and he declared if that man went to hell it would change the climate, and the emigration would be that way. Like John in the Revelation, Emerson censured the church he did not desert. Himself a heavenly body, his orbit an ellipse, he was now farther from, anon nearer to, the sun, -approaching it continually in his latter days, as the magnetic meridian returns to the pole. He had queried if Jesus even meant to teach the doctrine of immortality; but he con- cluded in the faith of identity. His last dying will and testimony was that the soul would persist and
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be the same. When the question was raised, he insisted that in the town where he lived and died his name was and must be on the church-books, and had never in any generation been taken there- from. He had compared these mortal vessels of ours to ships on the sea, whose captains shout through their speaking-trumpets as they pass, but cannot tell whence they sail or to what port bound, their faint voices lost in the roaring winds and waves. Yet he steered to and made port ! He died in odor of sanctity and in a heavenly faith. He had declared religion is moral; but he impersonated the Divinity as saying, -
" I am the sparkle of the spar," " And conscious law is King of kings."
The sacred sentences of the resurrection and the life on the old temple-walls over his coffin better than could extemporaneous speech or prayer per- formed a silent service for his dust. So Garrison dead was reclaimed by the church.
Bushnell's mind was kith and kin of Emerson's in its imaginative frame and its independent work- ing, though on different stuff. Not discarding the .old formulas, he piously strove to penetrate their significance. By rationalizing he would reconcile them to each other and to advancing intelligence. He declared he could swallow all the articles of all the sects. He had a solvent for denominational contradictions, as a well is a solution of salts and
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alkalies from every stratum of the globe. He shocked Orthodoxy out of its notion of a necessary sudden conversion, by affirming through the law of heredity that the children of Christian parents were of course Christians, church-begotten and church- born; and he wrought out his argument with resist- less strength and incomparable skill. He astonished Cambridge with the most brilliant and original ora- tion the Phi Beta Kappa Society ever heard, though Buckminster and Everett and Emerson as speakers were on its roll. He did not, like Emerson, bolt from his religious order; he reformed it from within. Emerson's phrase "the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism " fell blunted from such men as Channing, whom Emerson admired to the end of his days. Bushnell clung to the company he quickened from stagnancy, as Sheridan our general led to battle the soldiers he had conjured back from shameful rout.
Bushnell and Emerson were preachers from di- vinity schools, graduates with degrees of honor from academy and college. Taylor was a product of the soil, of that nature the solid gem on which he said education could but put a polish. " Hitch your wagon to a star," wrote Emerson. But Taylor was tackled when born! Genius has been called the power to kindle one's own fire. But Taylor might say with David, " The Lord shall light my candle." This man was as the bush that Moses saw, which burnt and was unconsumed. Other men whom I
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have known had flashes and jets; Taylor's lamp, like that in the temple of Vesta, never went out. His faculties were like the train which some engine all the time pushes or pulls. As a hot spring bursts up, or a volcano overflows, or a chemical mixture flames into spontaneous combustion, or a furnace is fed so that the heat never slacks, but when the stoker opens the door the blaze glares out through all the room, and we feel the presence of a force which we did not create, but can only guide and carefully hem in, and cannot tell its source more than we can where Horeb or Sinai got their voice and fire, - so this man did not make himself. He was possessed and elemental, controlled from above.
He was styled self-taught. No! he was taught of God, and was an expression or proof of the divine being. Atheistic conceit declares " God the noblest work of man," and that " a God should be invented if he did not exist." When the voice came from heaven to Jesus, some of the people said it thun- dered; others said an angel spake to him. When- ever we are stirred, we feel that the motion originates in no mortal creature, but is an order from on high. Taylor, yet a sailor-boy, happened one day in Bos- ton harbor into church. The exhorter, Parson Hedding, seemed to him like a ship under full sail, casting up the briny spray, some of which fell on the sailor-boy's face in the form of tears; and he was baptized on the spot. He was impressed for the voyage of life.
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II. But besides the genius these men had in common, Emerson, Bushnell, and Taylor were alike in native shrewdness. They all had the apostolic gift of the discerning of spirits, and were keen judges of character. Notable was their good hu- mor. No cloud so angry but any one of them, with the lightning-rod of some happy turn, could dis- charge safely of its bolt. No dilemma from which they could not beat a retreat and extricate a com- pany or soften a conversation by their irresistible provocation of a smile. When a theological pro- fessor denounced his transcendental oration as hurt- ful nonsense, Emerson inquired his name, and said, " He appears to be a very sensible man." He under- stood a large pharisee as well as he did the little one, who "when he fasts blows a trumpet before him." When Taylor, for once, got involved in his discourse, and the audience were embarrassed, he cried out, " I have lost my nominative case, but I am on the way to glory!" A great divine having labored long at my conversion, Bushnell asked him what in his argument he had done. " I have laid out the Pres- byterian creed," was the reply. Said Bushnell, - his eyes laughing before his lips did, -" You have put a shroud on it; for that is what they do when they lay things out!" Bushnell first studied for the law. A cross-examining lawyer asked him on the witness-stand, after he became a minister, if, hav- ing been a law-student, he could not understand the principle in the case under trial. Bushnell re-
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sponded, " I left the law because principle was what I found it had not!" With what delicious satire he affirms he has no personal feeling to the Con- necticut doctor of divinity of his own denomination who had fiercely assailed his new position, saying that he only wants to put his opponent into an atti- tude of "comprehensive repugnance "! Bushnell, Emerson, and Taylor were a fellowship of love and irony.
How large is the credit-side for these men's wit! What a grim scowling visage in the New-England theology before their day! They took the wrinkle from its features and put in a wreath. "O Lord, lift up the light of thy countenance upon us," but not that wrathful deity's dark forbidding face !
" It was that settled ceaseless gloom The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore, Who had no hope beyond the tomb, And could not look for rest before."
Taylor asked Bushnell how a Calvinist could be a Christian, when the same arbitrary decree that had elected him to heaven could forthwith turn round the stick, lift the damned to paradise and doom him to hell. The sailor-preacher admitted the sulphur, but considered it something to smell of, not to burn in. He practised a sort of homoeopathy of brim- stone, meanwhile dealing out large doses of wine and oil without money and without price, - good Samaritan of the pulpit as he was. Fun was his weapon with the unruly. At the conference he
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told the noisy boys in the gallery, " Go home, every mother's son of you : this is no net to catch shrimps!" As one of his Methodist brethren objected to any Unitarian occupation of the Bethel-desk, he fell on his knees and exclaimed from the pulpit-stairs, "O Lord, deliver us from bigotry and bad rum! Thou knowest which is worst, I do not." How he smoothed the furrows which fear had been the sex- ton to dig alike in the Puritanic faces and in their graves ! Well was the burial-ground formerly called the churchyard ! It was hard by, - the annex !
The service which Taylor and Bushnell and Emerson rendered was that of pioneers in the western woods, to chase away the wild-beast terror and let in the sun. It had been accounted a sin to raise a laugh on Sunday in the sanctuary. The sailor-preacher with his quick transitions tickled the organ of mirthfulness and unsealed the fountain of tears. We knew not if we cried or smiled : he wedded weeping to the merry heart. Solomon called a merry heart a perpetual feast. Like the traveller whose tales made the savages laugh so that they could not use their bows or tomahawks, Taylor disarmed the prophets of woe and despair. The drops he drew from our eyes were not cold and bitter, but warm and sweet.
How then did these men differ? In construing a book, in framing a theory, in observing an occa- sion, in arranging a service. Men can join in these things and cut each other's throats. They differed
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in bodily size, stature, complexion, and gait ; they agreed in loving God, in searching for truth, in de- votion to mankind, and in showing how congenial true religion is to the soul. Paul wrote that "the natural man perceiveth not the things of the spirit of God." He meant the man of flesh and sense. But it is natural, not unnatural, to man to be spirit- ual. Theologians have fancied man's nature must be changed ; and priests have too often changed it, as other living substances sometimes are, into stone. These men were no petrifiers or petrifac- tions. They knew and honored with mutual com- mendation, and never jarred. They were each other's complements. They belonged together, co- ordinate, like the three sides of a triangle including a large territory. But there was in them nothing stiff or sharp. Bushnell discoursed on work and play, and would in actual sport try with me which could throw a pebble farthest into the sea. Emer- son's posture was perpetual courtesy; he bent to bless. He hearkened oftener than he spoke. Tay- lor, about to die, did not count it would be much of a show when told he was going to see the angels. "Folks are better," he replied. He was going to the folks ! Like other sick people, he properly resented whispers in the entry about his condition, and being managed behind his back. At table as he stirred the spoon in his cup, looking straight at his contriv- ing nurse, he said grace thus : "O Lord, deliver us from deceit, conceit, and tattling." Tottering on
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the brink of death, like a vessel swaying to and fro before she goes down, he was still natural; he put on no airs. He needed no extreme unction ; he pre- pared no ascension-robes. Hamlet, being disgusted that his father was so soon forgot, says there is hope if a great man build churches that his mem- ory may last for half a year! I think all these men will be remembered for some centuries. While the courts here remain in which they all taught, this society should bear them in mind. Great edifices are removed or razed to the ground, streets are altered, the huge granite reservoir yonder is gone, leaving but a heap of rubbish; but the noble souls abide whose mortal feet trod the pavement, and who were greater than the temples in which they stood. They cannot be displaced from our respect. A week ago I saw the snow falling on the tombs in yonder cemetery in the heart of the city; I noticed how soon most of the stones and mounds were covered and hidden from view. But a few tall monuments were conspicuous still. They seemed to me as figures of great men.
Pardon my paying this personal debt to men who are influences. Emerson I hold a master of free thought and magnanimity. Unaware of the appli- cation of it to himself, he said of Lincoln : " His heart, big as the world, had yet no room for the memory of a wrong !" Bushnell's love opened a door for the poor radical into the Orthodox heart. He was as ready as Socrates to talk with stranger or
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heretic. When too weak to walk, he wanted to go out with a Unitarian visitor and show him the city of Hartford. But his family had hidden away his boots: he was shod for a different journey! Taylor was a universal wire, or rather the lightning-mes- sage. When Webster was waited for in Faneuil Hall, Taylor hushed the impatient crowd with the mellow thunder of his own word, praising their good nature, and saying, " The lion of the nation will come soon." He was himself a lion, of the breed of the tribe of Judah.
Such men are leaders for their own and of the following age. The flock of wild fowl yonder, sail- ing through air up the bay, keep together in their long, beautiful, wedge-like line to a predestined rest, and they have captains to their host in the sky which their flight adorns. Human creatures are a flock. They have a track, and conductors of their train. Keep your eye on the guides, and you will not stray.
University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.
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